Having formally and informally
declared that I am no longer a part of the atheist community, I have
been asking myself where that leaves me. Essentially, I have concluded
that, being as I spend far more time around believers than nonbelievers,
I am likely to be the only atheist many people know. While I am not
the S.E. Cupp sort of atheist, by which I mean sad I am not awesome and
lucky enough to have faith, and would not describe myself as a friendly
atheist, exactly, I would claim to be a reasonable and fair one. Having
been a believer until I was 26, I don't think I'll ever be able to
generalize that believers are stupid, as some atheists do. Most people
are believers, so I'd have to believe most people are stupid, which,
again, would not be a problem for some of my friends. Anyway, while I dislike and disbelieve religion
and all things that are supernatural, I understand that believers do not
necessarily reflect the elements to which I object. Likely, the
average believer in most secularized nations, meaning nontheocratic
nation states, embraces, as I did, a sort of nebulous humanism for which
they incorrectly give total, or near enough to it as to make no
difference, credit to their faith, rather than the philosophical
advances made throughout human history, notably during the
Enlightenment, which are far more likely to be reflective of their
values. Here I will present the four basic ingredients of my atheism,
which happen to be well-represented by the work Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris,
and Daniel Dennett. From there, I will explain the atheist movement in
terms of believer's concerns and where I might differ from it in
important ways.
Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion was the first book I read after I'd lost my faith. I did not read it as an atheist proper, mind you, so much as believer whose faith had gone and left a vacuum. Other books of textual criticism, notably the work of John Shelby Sprong, had led me to this point and affected how I reacted when my church's Sunday school conspired to end my then relationship with a fellow member on the grounds of disliking me personally, admittedly a near-universal quality for Arkansans. All the centuries of conflict between science and religion are documented here from the Catholic persecutions of Galileo Galilei, to the American Christian denouncement for the irreligious Einstein (only to be abandoned in later generations of efforts to falsely claim the great physicist as one of the faithful), to modern attempts to teach religion in science class. None of that is what interested me at first though. All I wanted to know was the answer to the argument from design. All my life, I had been told I have been created by an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being and I was finally beginning to understand the permanent state of profound loneliness, alienation from my fellow humans, and heartbreaking personal weakness in which I would be living. Reconciling all of that with a benevolent creator of any sort had become impossible for me and I no longer cared what his excuse or the excuse of any of his followers was. Dawkins details very well why God almost certainly does not exist and why we have a perfectly serviceable understanding of evolution through natural selection. All my problems are the result of either my own mistakes or an impersonal process of evolution through natural selection. If I am weak, then I possess weak genes, and my bad social skills will prevent me from reproducing. Evolution simply does not care about my personal feelings, which also means it means me no harm. That is far more comforting and easier to live with than a God who is supposed to have a plan and trying to reconcile my life with that plan.
Christopher Hitchens book makes the case for anti-theism first and foremost. Yes, Hitchens states that there is nothing supernatural, but also that we should not want there to be. The myths and texts upon which the world's religions are based are not of a character wherein one might wish them to be true stories. Yahweh, though his various names and reputations through various texts, is among the worst, but every real world deity which has been significantly worshipped with which I or anyone I have read is familiar is, at best, an advocate of unreasonable things, and at worst, an advocate of things to which ordinary morality would object. Hitchens took me through the horrors of sectarian violence. Catholics and Protestants in the United Kingdom, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic with Muslims in the middle, in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, Tamil Hindus and Muslims in Sri Lanka, Shiites and Sunnis in...um take your pick, and on and on and bloody on through the bloody millennia. For the first time, it was made clear to me the realities of female genital mutilation, honor killing, and the systematic, repeated, and covered-up rape and torture of children. This was all necessary to open up my mind to the reality that my own history with the Methodist church had been soft and easy. Many parts of the world had failed to sequester and tame the religious impulse. Scripture calling for one to kill in God's name tends to not have clauses allowing oneself to abstain if the secular government says it's not okay. Worldwide, you see sects of religions who still do what their ancient holy books say to do to the letter, and the results are not communes of love and wisdom. Neighborhoods where Sharia Law reign display this better than anything else. On a personal level, my ex-fiance had quite a campaign, of manipulation, lies, wishful thinking, and general delusion she embarked upon with me. Seeing that the world's religions reminded me more of her tactics than they did not was a real eye-opener, and closed the door to faith forevermore.
Sam Harris' The End Of Faith is principally concerned with morality. Later, he would write a whole book just on morality, but The End Of Faith is very focused on looking at it in theological terms. Essentially, its thesis is that there is nothing in in religion that can be arrived at as regards morality than cannot be arrived at by entirely secular means that is worth having. Coming at from a psychologist's perspective, Harris takes emotion out of it more than the previous two. Dawkins was passionate about science enough to lose his patience with the faithful and Hitchens had seen too many die for or by faith around the world to be dispassionate, but Harris is probably the most objective of them. A dispassionate text like his goes about its task of systematically proving faith incompatible with reason. By tracing the roots of morality and comparing the morality of believers and nonbelievers, Harris manages to prove that morality is mostly secular and cultural. A breakthrough of sorts for any atheist is realizing that religious morality is secular morality dressed up in religious clothing. Cases where this is not so tend to involve crimes against humanity. Most people consider the opposite to be true and that we need God to be good, lest we turn out to be like the Hitler and Stalin regimes. Moral progress, whether it be in the abolishment of slavery, the emancipation of women, the reduction of tribalism in the species, or a general increase in human solidarity have no place in ancient holy books. Once one has accepted that humanity has already vastly improved upon and exceeded the morality of the Bible, one starts to get a true sense of how paradigm-changing atheism can be.
Daniel Dennett was the final of these four authors to whom I was exposed I would say that in Breaking The Spell, he writes at a level where I can barely comprehend it. I'm not exactly an intellectual lightweight either, so that should tell you the deep waters the philosophy professor sails upon. Essentially though, he's the only one to be writing about religion itself and trying to figure it out in a completely impartial way. Every atheist eventually asks themselves why these lies were told to them and Dennett does as good a job as any in explaining the reasons. Key among the concepts he lays out is the idea that many people who do not believe nonetheless believe in belief. Many nonbelievers believe that faith, nonetheless, has good consequences, whether for themselves or in a more altruistic sense, so they help to keep it going. Some atheists don't want other atheists in positions where moral responsibility plays a large role because they want someone who at least believes in something. To some extent, this is a problem of linguistics. Atheists can and do have principles of objective morality and ideas about what makes for a happy productive human life that are not at all out of the norm for the species. When an atheist says he doesn't believe in anything, he means in anything supernatural, which means that he has, through logic and reasoning, arrived at the same level of stability in his morality and happiness that would be available to a person of faith. Born Again Christians are onto something when they say that atheists are trying to do it on their own strength, but a fundamental misunderstanding is in play when they say that they are trying to be their own God. So ingrained is a belief in the absolute and supernatural sense that a belief of a more reasonable and practical variety that one's own faculty of discernment is both enough and all that is available is alternatively baffling and incredibly depressing to the believer.
If it seems to you that the atheist movement is overwhelmingly a leftist one, I cannot disagree. My own experience is that many believe the right is not even worth arguing with and there is, it turns out, an organization with that as its guiding sentiment. More recently, I've divorced myself from the atheist community entirely due to its solidarity with the Occupy movement and that movement's zealous hatred of me, my family, and all in our socioeconomic class who refuse to prostitute ourselves by begging to have our taxes raised, regardless of the quantity or quality of our personal charity. From the religious right's point of view, it would seem that acknowledging the nonexistence of God would require having the government replace God, and that certainly seems to be the goal of much of the atheist movement. Instead of being forced to tithe for some grand cathedral, I shall be forced to pay my taxes to cover the important work of building a bridge to nowhere, and my objection in both cases will compel those who demand more of my money without cause to call into question my morality and compassion. All I can tell you is that there is more than one kind of atheist. This atheist rejects all masters, supernatural and governmental alike, and disbelieves in God without the slightest desire to replace him with anything. While I am very lonely and convinced that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that state of affairs will ever cease, I cannot look to a deity, a government, or anything else to solve the lonely nature of my own human condition. Instead, I can only accept it and attempt to be as happy and productive as I can be within the context of it. So many believers would long to tell me that I would be happier if I sought deific help, but then they nearly always make the mistake of telling me that that deity created me. From that point on, I don't listen because I know that if he is as is popularly believed, I can only patiently wait for hell due to my utter rejection of any being that would create a man like me for a world like this, and if he is, instead, benevolent, then I await the merciful oblivion he shall surely grant me. Fortunately, for all of us, I am not the created creature of any deity, but simply a small weak man too unappealing to attract women who will not hurt him and it is no one's fault that I was born that way. Given this, all I ask is for the compassion I try and show to people with whom I interact, because it's a hard world and, although I am very lonely, there are much worse problems to be had.
-Frank
Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion was the first book I read after I'd lost my faith. I did not read it as an atheist proper, mind you, so much as believer whose faith had gone and left a vacuum. Other books of textual criticism, notably the work of John Shelby Sprong, had led me to this point and affected how I reacted when my church's Sunday school conspired to end my then relationship with a fellow member on the grounds of disliking me personally, admittedly a near-universal quality for Arkansans. All the centuries of conflict between science and religion are documented here from the Catholic persecutions of Galileo Galilei, to the American Christian denouncement for the irreligious Einstein (only to be abandoned in later generations of efforts to falsely claim the great physicist as one of the faithful), to modern attempts to teach religion in science class. None of that is what interested me at first though. All I wanted to know was the answer to the argument from design. All my life, I had been told I have been created by an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being and I was finally beginning to understand the permanent state of profound loneliness, alienation from my fellow humans, and heartbreaking personal weakness in which I would be living. Reconciling all of that with a benevolent creator of any sort had become impossible for me and I no longer cared what his excuse or the excuse of any of his followers was. Dawkins details very well why God almost certainly does not exist and why we have a perfectly serviceable understanding of evolution through natural selection. All my problems are the result of either my own mistakes or an impersonal process of evolution through natural selection. If I am weak, then I possess weak genes, and my bad social skills will prevent me from reproducing. Evolution simply does not care about my personal feelings, which also means it means me no harm. That is far more comforting and easier to live with than a God who is supposed to have a plan and trying to reconcile my life with that plan.
Christopher Hitchens book makes the case for anti-theism first and foremost. Yes, Hitchens states that there is nothing supernatural, but also that we should not want there to be. The myths and texts upon which the world's religions are based are not of a character wherein one might wish them to be true stories. Yahweh, though his various names and reputations through various texts, is among the worst, but every real world deity which has been significantly worshipped with which I or anyone I have read is familiar is, at best, an advocate of unreasonable things, and at worst, an advocate of things to which ordinary morality would object. Hitchens took me through the horrors of sectarian violence. Catholics and Protestants in the United Kingdom, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic with Muslims in the middle, in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, Tamil Hindus and Muslims in Sri Lanka, Shiites and Sunnis in...um take your pick, and on and on and bloody on through the bloody millennia. For the first time, it was made clear to me the realities of female genital mutilation, honor killing, and the systematic, repeated, and covered-up rape and torture of children. This was all necessary to open up my mind to the reality that my own history with the Methodist church had been soft and easy. Many parts of the world had failed to sequester and tame the religious impulse. Scripture calling for one to kill in God's name tends to not have clauses allowing oneself to abstain if the secular government says it's not okay. Worldwide, you see sects of religions who still do what their ancient holy books say to do to the letter, and the results are not communes of love and wisdom. Neighborhoods where Sharia Law reign display this better than anything else. On a personal level, my ex-fiance had quite a campaign, of manipulation, lies, wishful thinking, and general delusion she embarked upon with me. Seeing that the world's religions reminded me more of her tactics than they did not was a real eye-opener, and closed the door to faith forevermore.
Sam Harris' The End Of Faith is principally concerned with morality. Later, he would write a whole book just on morality, but The End Of Faith is very focused on looking at it in theological terms. Essentially, its thesis is that there is nothing in in religion that can be arrived at as regards morality than cannot be arrived at by entirely secular means that is worth having. Coming at from a psychologist's perspective, Harris takes emotion out of it more than the previous two. Dawkins was passionate about science enough to lose his patience with the faithful and Hitchens had seen too many die for or by faith around the world to be dispassionate, but Harris is probably the most objective of them. A dispassionate text like his goes about its task of systematically proving faith incompatible with reason. By tracing the roots of morality and comparing the morality of believers and nonbelievers, Harris manages to prove that morality is mostly secular and cultural. A breakthrough of sorts for any atheist is realizing that religious morality is secular morality dressed up in religious clothing. Cases where this is not so tend to involve crimes against humanity. Most people consider the opposite to be true and that we need God to be good, lest we turn out to be like the Hitler and Stalin regimes. Moral progress, whether it be in the abolishment of slavery, the emancipation of women, the reduction of tribalism in the species, or a general increase in human solidarity have no place in ancient holy books. Once one has accepted that humanity has already vastly improved upon and exceeded the morality of the Bible, one starts to get a true sense of how paradigm-changing atheism can be.
Daniel Dennett was the final of these four authors to whom I was exposed I would say that in Breaking The Spell, he writes at a level where I can barely comprehend it. I'm not exactly an intellectual lightweight either, so that should tell you the deep waters the philosophy professor sails upon. Essentially though, he's the only one to be writing about religion itself and trying to figure it out in a completely impartial way. Every atheist eventually asks themselves why these lies were told to them and Dennett does as good a job as any in explaining the reasons. Key among the concepts he lays out is the idea that many people who do not believe nonetheless believe in belief. Many nonbelievers believe that faith, nonetheless, has good consequences, whether for themselves or in a more altruistic sense, so they help to keep it going. Some atheists don't want other atheists in positions where moral responsibility plays a large role because they want someone who at least believes in something. To some extent, this is a problem of linguistics. Atheists can and do have principles of objective morality and ideas about what makes for a happy productive human life that are not at all out of the norm for the species. When an atheist says he doesn't believe in anything, he means in anything supernatural, which means that he has, through logic and reasoning, arrived at the same level of stability in his morality and happiness that would be available to a person of faith. Born Again Christians are onto something when they say that atheists are trying to do it on their own strength, but a fundamental misunderstanding is in play when they say that they are trying to be their own God. So ingrained is a belief in the absolute and supernatural sense that a belief of a more reasonable and practical variety that one's own faculty of discernment is both enough and all that is available is alternatively baffling and incredibly depressing to the believer.
If it seems to you that the atheist movement is overwhelmingly a leftist one, I cannot disagree. My own experience is that many believe the right is not even worth arguing with and there is, it turns out, an organization with that as its guiding sentiment. More recently, I've divorced myself from the atheist community entirely due to its solidarity with the Occupy movement and that movement's zealous hatred of me, my family, and all in our socioeconomic class who refuse to prostitute ourselves by begging to have our taxes raised, regardless of the quantity or quality of our personal charity. From the religious right's point of view, it would seem that acknowledging the nonexistence of God would require having the government replace God, and that certainly seems to be the goal of much of the atheist movement. Instead of being forced to tithe for some grand cathedral, I shall be forced to pay my taxes to cover the important work of building a bridge to nowhere, and my objection in both cases will compel those who demand more of my money without cause to call into question my morality and compassion. All I can tell you is that there is more than one kind of atheist. This atheist rejects all masters, supernatural and governmental alike, and disbelieves in God without the slightest desire to replace him with anything. While I am very lonely and convinced that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that state of affairs will ever cease, I cannot look to a deity, a government, or anything else to solve the lonely nature of my own human condition. Instead, I can only accept it and attempt to be as happy and productive as I can be within the context of it. So many believers would long to tell me that I would be happier if I sought deific help, but then they nearly always make the mistake of telling me that that deity created me. From that point on, I don't listen because I know that if he is as is popularly believed, I can only patiently wait for hell due to my utter rejection of any being that would create a man like me for a world like this, and if he is, instead, benevolent, then I await the merciful oblivion he shall surely grant me. Fortunately, for all of us, I am not the created creature of any deity, but simply a small weak man too unappealing to attract women who will not hurt him and it is no one's fault that I was born that way. Given this, all I ask is for the compassion I try and show to people with whom I interact, because it's a hard world and, although I am very lonely, there are much worse problems to be had.
-Frank
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